A Twitter account maintained by Fox News has been hacked to post fake "Obama assassinated" stories.
The @foxnewspolitics account was seized to post a succession of bogus updates (example below) on the false story that Obama was shot and killed while supposedly campaigning at a Ross' restaurant in Iowa.
The obviously …

Is that the truth....

How do these hacks work?

Just guessing

Here's how tey COULD do it:

If n<5:

Try four times. Wait for the user to login (=post to Twitter), thus resetting the counter. Try four times. Repeat.

OR IF the user don't login, wait an hour (counter is reset after an hour according to http://support.twitter.com/entries/63510-i-m-locked-out-after-too-many-login-attempts) before trying four times again.

But, more likely, they've used a social hack or someone re-used the same password on other sites.

No Hack

Not the official twitter account

That's not their official twitter account. Someone has just created a twitter account, themed it to match and built up followers. Then you guys have written articles on it. lmao and its not even April 1st

Twitter security

I set up a twitter account on my Blackberry, with a reasonable complex password on Saturday morning. By Saturday afternoon, my account was spamming tweets without my knowledge advertising "make $$$$'s" websites. Clearly something not right with the security model here.

My Twitter account was hacked - here's how they did it

On 14th April I stayed at the Miyako hotel in Los Angeles. I connected to WiFi (hotel had an open network) and accessed twitter. Didn't post anything, but my cookie was apparently transferred in any case. A few minutes later a tweet went out from my Twitter feed with a malicious URL in it.

Even simpler to do with the new automated android tool :( So I now have a VPN I use when on the road (SSHtunnel) , and have set Twitter to https by default. No harm done (thank goodness), and it was a great wake-up call for me. They could really have sniffed some good login credentials from me, had their bot been looking more efficiently...